I am a cognitive neuroscientist interested in understanding why children differ in how they develop language. My research combines developmental psychology, linguistics, and neuroscience to investigate the cognitive and neural mechanisms underlying individual differences in language development. I am particularly interested in children with neurodevelopmental conditions, where language abilities can vary substantially both within and across diagnostic groups.
I am currently a Marie Skłodowska-Curie Actions Postdoctoral Fellow at the Donders Institute and Radboud University Medical Center. My MSCA project, BRight, investigates whether alternative right-hemispheric neural pathways contribute to individual differences in language development in autistic children. Using multimodal neuroimaging and data fusion approaches to capitalize on the shared information of structural, functional and diffusion MRI, I examine how variation in functional and structural brain networks relates to children’s language abilities.
Before joining the Donders Institute, I was a postdoctoral researcher in the Brain Development Lab at Vanderbilt University, where I studied the neural mechanisms of language processing and development in young children. This work strengthened my interest in how differences in language abilities relate to variation in the developing brain.
I completed my PhD in Psychology at Ghent University, where I studied individual differences in language abilities in autistic preschoolers as part of the Preschool Brain Imaging and Behaviour Project (PIP) within AIMS-2-TRIALS. Before my PhD, I completed bachelor’s degrees in Dutch Language and Literature and Linguistics as well as a master’s in Language and Cognition at the University of Groningen. This interdisciplinary background continues to shape how I approach questions about language development today.
To get in touch, please feel free to reach out to marjolein.mues@donders.ru.nl